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Haitian Creole Morphology: French Phonetic Matrices in a West African Mold

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Claire Lefebvre
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
Anne-Marie Brousseau
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
Sandra Filipovich
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal

Extract

This paper summarizes the findings of an extensive study of Haitian Creole morphology as compared with that of contributing languages: French, the lexifier language, and Fon, the West African language selected as the substratum language. The proposal we want to argue for in this paper is that, although the phonetic matrices of Haitian Creole lexical items are recognizable as being from French, at a more abstract level the productive affixes of Haitian Creole pattern in a significant way with the model of contributing West African languages, in this case Fon. This being the case, the widespread assumption in the creole literature that creole languages have undergone morphological simplification is not borne out by the Haitian data (cf. several discussions on this topic in Hymes 1971).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1989

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